Publication Date: 07-25-2026

Joe’s College Road Trip (2026) review

Dir. Tyler Perry

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

Frankly, it’s about time Joe Simmons, brother of Madea, got his own movie after existing as a side-character in Tyler Perry’s long-running franchise. Most notably, Joe was a recurring player in both of the Boo! movies; a bluster-filled codger, who existed mainly to belittle his sister and chase tail. Not only is this the first movie headlined by the character (like Madea, played by Perry), but this is Perry’s first attempt at a raunchy, R-rated comedy. One of the benefits of Perry’s recent streaming deals with Netflix and Amazon is he’s been liberated to take more risks, opting to make a period drama (A Jazzman’s Blues), a biographical war movie (The Six Triple Eight), and further continue his Madea franchise after initially laying it to rest in 2019.

To the surprise of no one, Joe’s College Road Trip isn’t very good. Like most Perry comedies, it’s overlong, prone to caricatures, and sometimes exhaustingly contrived. That said, it is consistently amusing, if for no other reason than Perry’s Joe is afforded the opportunity to at least show some sociopolitical cognizance, adding more dimension to his character than simply being an old horndog. And it is hilarious to watch Joe hit his stride in a vulgar tirade. Perry brings a Richard Pryor/Eddie Murphy-esque edge to Joe, and essentially makes this his version of Bad Grandpa; however, instead of pranks on the unsuspecting public, we get a fairly rote road movie template.

The film opens with a faux educational documentary scene, essentially playing as a trigger warning. We’re told Joe is 89-years-old, and is “what one might call an endangered Negro species.” A former pimp with a third-grade education, he uses the word “motherfucker” 76 times, the N-word 74 times, and peppers his lexicon with “bitch” and “hoe” whenever he pleases. Tis pity much of this appears to be AI-generated (shame on Perry).

The counterbalance to Joe is his grandson, B.J. (Jermaine Harris), who is so nerdy and helpless that he’d probably get his ass kicked by Steve Urkel. The fact that B.J. is one of the most insufferable characters Perry has yet to write is saying something. He’s about to go to college, he’s vegan, he starts his day with vitamins and antihistamines, and is quick to call out toxic masculinity, misogyny, the objectification of women, and remind his grandpa that his cherry-red 1970s Buick convertible runs on fossil fuels, unlike his Tesla.

Part of the reason B.J. is such a big dweeb is the fact that his father, Brian (also Perry), has coddled him in the comfort of white suburbia to the point where his son doesn’t understand Black history. Brian confides in Madea (also Perry) and Joe after B.J. and his two white friends question why HBCUs even exist (“there are no historically white colleges,” one of his friends says in one of the cringier moments in the film).

B.J. sets his post-high school sights on Pepperdine in Los Angeles. But before the orientation, Joe elects to take the boy on a road trip from Atlanta to California. There’s really no impetus for the road trip. They’re not touring universities, but instead, stopping at a variety of locations important to Black history (Beale Street; Money, MS, where Emmitt Till was killed; etc). On the road, the predictable generational divide comes into play constantly. Grandpa laments grandson’s overreliance on “Tikker-Tokker,” while grandson accosts granddad over his unchecked vulgarity and attitude towards women. Joe responds to most of these verbal spats with stuttering, breathless rants, so much so that you can tell a handful of moments where Perry flubs his lines were kept in the film as if to enhance the believability of Joe’s impromptu, stream-of-consciousness form of speaking.

At a southern brothel, B.J. saves a sex worker named Destiny (a lovely Amber Reign Smith) from being trafficked. Eventually, Joe tosses both his grandson and “the hoe” out of his convertible and strands them in the middle of nowhere, leaving the two lost souls to search for a clue.

Sparing Joe’s College Road Trip from being a featherweight is Joe wanting to educate B.J. about where Black Americans came from, and how the struggle for Civil Rights wasn’t fought on cell phones. It gives Joe’s character some additional validation in the long-run, which I suppose was necessary if you were going to build a two-hour movie around a man who could’ve starred in Pimps Up, Ho’s Down. One of Joe’s most piercingly accurate observations about B.J., and more-so his generation, is when he states that kids his age “watch a 30 second video and think you’re an expert.” You get the impression that Perry, who is now 56-years-old, is using Joe as a vessel for his own views on the world at his age, and feels a comfort spewing vulgar, unfiltered opinions when buried under a pound of geezer makeup.

Joe’s College Road Trip prompts more smiles than outright laughs, and B.J.’s character is written in such a lazy, overgeneralized way that he himself is comedic quicksand. That said, it did make me recall my high school and college years when I elected to spend a week by my grandpa’s every summer. It was a whole lot of nothing, but that’s what made that time special. My grandpa and I lived off of hot dogs, pots of coffee, and 7&7s, watched Bar Rescue and Two and a Half Men, and my name was “Shitbird.” That kind of male-bonding with an elder you respect is something you cannot quantify when you’re figuring out who you are as a person. Perry’s first foray into R-rated raunch isn’t that deep, but its saving grace is it’s far more entertaining than Mea Culpa, Divorce in the Black, or another one of his assembly line dramas.

Starring: Tyler Perry, Jermaine Harris, Amber Reign Smith, Millie Jackson, and Ms. Pat. Directed by: Tyler Perry.